


Learning Curve

by Lyn Piton (Magniflorious)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 23:57:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/855453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magniflorious/pseuds/Lyn%20Piton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has, after all, learned to ask the important questions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Learning Curve

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, _Annie_ (for those of you who catch that reference) or anything else you recognize.
> 
> This was originally written in 2005, pre-HBP, for what it's worth.

No one is born with black eyes.

Hermione's parents have told the story of her birth so many times that she knows even her muddy, boring brown orbs _("Don't be silly, dear, they're lovely!")_ first shone vibrant indigo blue.

For a day or two.

Children arrive in peals of gurgling laughter, all soft warmth and sweet smell. Hermione loves to baby-sit, so she knows this. And she doesn't understand.

What could turn one of these screaming, crying, shining bundles of innocence into this man thundering into the classroom? What injustices sanded down childhood curves into hollows and angles?

When did it start?

Was it as those eyes learned to focus? Did that heavy brow fall to shield the expectant gaze from a dark reality? Or later, perhaps soft brown became brittle black as he watched his mother's blood dry on the rough-hewn floor. Does when matter?

She has, after all, learned to ask the right questions. Even in this class, with this man, as she raises her hand to patiently await the cold sting of his tongue, she longs to move closer, to climb inside this shell and clear away the cobwebs and the sorrow. 'Till there's none. Because that is what she does, she fixes.

But she has learned from Winky that not everything yearns to be free. He has perfected his role as a surgeon, gracefully skewering students and removing arrogance with deft, economic motions. And if at times it seems that his bloodless operations are designed to disable everything but the armor shielding his heart, well, he never claimed to do no harm.

The class is leaving, a whirl of skirts and bags and books, but her feet are planted at her station and although her heart is pounding, her mind is clear. She knows the important question.

The robes billow importantly as he glides to her, his mouth open in a tirade that arrests at look on her face. She places her sweaty palms on the cool counter-top as she meets that fathomless gaze. "Why?" she asks softly, and the brow smooths as he absorbs the question.

"Because there was nothing else left," he murmurs, his velvet voice enveloping her in warmth, a hint of the man he could have been. Before she can reply, he is gone, and she packs her things slowly, wondering what good magic is, after all.


	2. Decay

_The physical process by which a sound gradually disappears from the audible spectrum until it no longer exists. Simply put, decay is the time that it takes for a note to die away once the musician has stopped producing the sound. The sound waves dissipate in much the same manner as waves produced by tossing a stone in a pond. Decay is a basic component of how a sound is defined._

_~Virginia Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary_

No one understands his tirades, himself least of all. His anger, the noise and the spit, combine as the countermelody turned dominant, like an untalented orchestra where the plodding 'celli and shrill violins smother the plaintive whisper of the flute.

Growing up, he had endured lessons on the pianoforte, as any well-schooled five-year-old inhabiting the wizarding world should. "You have a pianist's hands," the teacher would exclaim, over and over each lesson as if discovering anew, as if she had not agreed to teach him for precisely this reason. His eyes would track the black splashed across the page, attempting idioms in a language in which he could not converse. One day, in youthful impatience, he performed the framework of each song, bare bones without cartilage to hold them together.

"But Severus," the teacher had said, her thin, wavering voice a sad contrast to the sounds she created outside herself. "You have eliminated the melody." Her gaze pinned itself to him like a showy label inside a shirt, scratchy, uncomfortable, unwelcome.

Without apology, he began again, his mind screaming that he had intended to eliminate the melody, that the mathematics of the piece was entirely more logical without it, and why did everyone want to hear the same thing again anyway?

It was during his teacher's praise afterward that he first felt contempt.

\---

It would be years, decades, before he would understand the value of melody, be able to see beauty in its illogical emotions, its humanity. In those years his eyes had turned from the piano to the book and the wand, from harmony to the dissonance engendered by a fellowship of hatred. By then his pianist's hands were marred, stained with blood and potions ingredients, stiff with tension and shame.

It had to be his mind's fault. His hands, after all, had never failed him.

His voice, then, became his instrument, though he still eliminated the melody, no longer out of contempt, but fear. Without a tune, the story cannot be told, and the audience will not comprehend; except Dumbledore, who uses his heart to hear the symphonies awaiting composition.

In the safety of his logic he had forgotten that all acts need practice, and he railed his two-chord progressions to the world as the melody withered, until one day he woke and remembered nothing but smoke and mirrors.

No one understands his tirades, himself least of all, and while his voice is hollower now, there is little audience remaining to remark upon the change.

So the years pass, washing over his heart until it erodes the chambers, leaving shallow plains where great fjords once prevailed. He tries to convince himself he is relieved, that his anger is for what he has, not what he has lost.

But then she comes, energy and life and curiosity that he almost remembers, so close he can touch them, brush them with the very tips of his fingers before remembrance takes flight. His chorus of deflection sustains a frantic crescendo, but he knows it will not deter her.

He tries to believe that he wishes it would.

She hears with her eyes and breathes with her mind, and he knows, sooner than later, she will want answers. He waits for the question, holding his breath until faint strains of a tune long lost climb through his chest, wafting words he didn't craft out of his closed throat.

The song ends before it begins, and he exits, equally afraid of speech and silence.


End file.
